SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS

Cataclysm

NOVEMBER 6, 1860

A CANNON FIRED. SUNRISE. A FLARE OF ORANGE AND A CUMULUS of smoke. Then another. Glass shook. Geese took flight. No threat here—it was Election Day, November 6, 1860, six months earlier. The cannon discharge was for the town to wake up and vote. This being Springfield, Illinois, in the heart of farm country in that climactic autumn, nearly everyone was already up, and nearly everyone would vote. It was a four-way race, the outcome uncertain but with Lincoln generally believed to be the frontrunner. If none of the candidates acquired a clear majority of votes, the election would be decided in the House of Representatives.

With the sound of the morning cannon there arose what one reporter called an “out-door tumult” as people began surging toward the city’s only polling place, on the second floor of the Sangamon County Court House at Sixth and Washington. The owner of a nearby ice cream parlor opened his shop to a group of Republican women who laid out a feast of coffee, sandwiches, oysters, and cake.

Springfield was Lincoln’s hometown. He walked the five blocks from his house to his campaign office, which, thanks to a courtesy by the governor, was located in the Illinois state capitol in a suite ordinarily occupied by the governor himself. At one point during the day Lincoln said that elections in America were like “‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.” In Quincy, Massachusetts, Rep. Charles Francis Adams, an abolitionist ally of Lincoln’s and prolific diarist, marveled at how peacefully the day was progressing despite the passions roiling the country. “It is a remarkable idea,” he wrote, “to reflect that all over this broad land at this moment the process of changing the rulers is peacefully going on, and what a change in all probability.”

A cataclysmic change: If Lincoln won and the Republican Party took control in Washington, it would sweep out the administration of James Buchanan and the proslavery Democratic Party, which had filled most federal posts with men sympathetic to the South and its “peculiar institution.” The Democrats had held almost unshakeable control of both houses of Congress since 1833, at times with stunning majorities. In the latest complete session, which ended in 1859, Democrats held forty-two more House seats than Republicans; in the Senate they had a two-to-one majority. But suddenly Lincoln seemed to have a chance. Conflict within the Democratic Party had caused a rift that led Northern and Southern factions to propose presidential candidates of their own. In addition, a new Constitutional Union Party claiming to seek North-South rapprochement nominated a third candidate. And the Republican Party, fast gaining strength, nominated Lincoln. With four candidates dividing the field, Lincoln’s backers saw a clear path to the White House. The prospect of party change was by itself daunting for the slaveholding South, but the ascent of Lincoln made it terrifying. Many Southerners, egged on by activists known as “fire-eaters,” reviled Lincoln as a fanatical abolitionist whom they imagined to be hell-bent on making Blacks and whites equal in all things—an intolerable prospect, despite Lincoln’s repeated vow not to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed. So hated was he that ten Deep South states did not even include him on the ballot. The South’s most radical newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, urged that if Lincoln won, every slaveholding state should secede immediately.

At about three-thirty P.M. Lincoln strolled across the square to cast his own vote as adoring locals called out his various nicknames:

OLD ABE,

UNCLE ABE,

HONEST ABE,

GIANT KILLER.

This last was an allusion to one of his opponents in the race, Stephen Douglas, a man of diminutive stature but high intellect known to the public and the press as “The Little Giant.”

A crowd followed. Lincoln made it easy. His praying-mantis frame measured six-four without shoes or hat, yet he wore a black silk stovepipe all the same, and this increased his visible height to about seven feet. He climbed the stairs in a few long strides and approached a window designated for Republican voters. The crowd behind him swelled.

His private secretary, John Nicolay, recorded the scene in a memorandum that day. The courthouse steps, Nicolay wrote, “were thronged with People, who welcomed him with immense cheering, and followed him in dense numbers along the hall and up stairs into the Court room, which was also crowded. Here the applause became absolutely deafening, and from the time he entered the room and until he cast his vote and again left it, there was wild huzzaing, waving of hats, and all sorts of demonstrations of applause,—rendering all other noises insignificant and futile.”

At the window, the candidate announced his name, “Abraham Lincoln,” as if the clerk and everyone else in town did not already know him. He dropped his ballot in an adjacent glass bowl. In a demonstration of humility, he first snipped his own name from the paper ballot, so as not to appear to be voting for himself; he otherwise voted a straight Republican ticket. It took him an hour to make his way back downstairs and through the crowd to his office.

Soon news of the early returns began to arrive by telegraph. This chattering skein of wires—fifty thousand miles of it—had transformed communication. While not quite instantaneous, given the many points where messages had to be transcribed and relayed, it nonetheless passed for miraculous. Messengers brought the latest returns to the campaign office. The mood was subdued. “Lincoln never poured out his soul to any mortal creature at any time,” wrote William H. Herndon, his law partner. “He was the most secretive—reticent—shut-mouthed man that ever existed.” Those who knew him could tell, however, that the suspense was eroding his reserve. “Mr. Lincoln was calm and collected as ever in his life,” a friend and political advisor, Thurlow Weed, said, “but there was a nervous twitch on his countenance when the messenger from the telegraph office entered, that indicated an anxiety within that no coolness from without could repress.”

By nine P.M. the tension became too great even for the hard-to-ruffle Lincoln. It was full-on dark by then, the streets ill lit and soft from rain. Accompanied by secretary Nicolay and two friends, Lincoln walked over to the telegraph office and by invitation of the operators sat on a sofa near the receivers. Lincoln on a sofa was like a ship’s mast on a barstool, poised in an uneasy equilibrium between relaxation and structural collapse.

The messages arrived in code, as was the practice of the day. The operator transcribed them onto small pieces of paper the color of mustard. These were immediately snatched from his hands by others now crowding the room and passed along until eventually they reached Lincoln. The news was good and kept getting better. He took Chicago by twenty-five hundred votes; Connecticut by ten thousand; Pittsburgh by at least ten thousand. But the big question was New York.

First came a cryptic message from the chair of New York’s Republican Party: “The city of New York will more than meet your expectations.”

Lincoln left the telegraph office but then came back.

At last the crucial telegram from New York arrived: “We tender you our congratulations upon this magnificent victory.”

New York City had gone for Lincoln with enough of a majority to win the entire state, a big prize that would garner thirty-five electoral votes. Late in the evening Lincoln learned that he also won Springfield, where all four candidates were popular. He’d won it by twenty-two votes. At which point, as one observer noted, Lincoln at last allowed himself an expression of joy, “a sudden exuberant utterance—neither a cheer nor a crow, but something partaking of the nature of each.”

And he laughed out loud.

The laughter did not last long. Nicolay watched him as the enormity of the moment sank in. He had all but won. “It seemed as if he suddenly bore the whole world upon his shoulders, and could not shake it off.”

Elsewhere wild rumors circulated: Riots had broken out in New York City; Stephen Douglas was taken hostage by secessionists in Alabama; Washington was on fire. Across the South the most petrifying genre of rumors took root—those indicating that a widespread slave insurrection, the thing Southerners most feared, had begun. Word spread in Texas that abolitionists and enslaved Blacks were plotting the slaughter of white women while their husbands were out voting. For many in the South the election was the crucible event. A Lincoln victory, wrote fire-eater Edmund Ruffin in his diary, “will serve to show whether these Southern States are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved—whether the institution of negro slavery on which the social and political existence of the South rests, is to be secured by our resistance, or to be abolished in a short time.” Ruffin dearly hoped—“most earnestly and anxiously desired”—that Lincoln would win, “because I have hope that at least one state S.C. will secede, and that others will follow.” If the South did not resist, he wrote, “there never will be future maintenance of our rights—and the end of negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions and our fate.”

In Springfield there was revelry. Lights blazed in the Hall of Representatives in the state capitol building, Nicolay reported to his fiancée, Therena Bates, “and it was filled nearly all night by a crowd shouting, yelling, singing, dancing, and indulging in all sorts of demonstrations of happiness as the news came in.”

TELEGRAM AFTER TELEGRAM ARRIVED. By midnight the outcome became certain. It was a strange victory: Lincoln won more of the popular vote than any candidate, more in fact than any president had ever won—nearly 1,866,000 votes—but this was only 40 percent of the national total. With the race split four ways, however, it was more than enough. He took the Electoral College by a wide margin. Even so, the returns offered little hope for bridging the nation’s division. In those few Southern states where he was included on the ballot, he received few votes. In Virginia he won just over 1 percent; in Kentucky, the state of his birth, less than 1 percent.

At around two in the morning, Lincoln headed home. He found his wife, Mary, asleep. He touched her shoulder. No response. “I spoke again, a little louder,” he recalled later. “‘Mary, Mary! We are elected!’”

Shortly before this, however, as he was walking home, a friend heard him say, “God help me, God help me.”

ALTHOUGH HE HAD CLEARLY won the election, Lincoln, ever the stickler for legal detail, could not quite settle into his victory. The final certification of Electoral College votes would not take place for another three months, on February 13, and given the rising unrest in the country, there was considerable uncertainty as to whether this would come off without strife. For one thing, in accord with the Constitution, the incumbent vice president, John C. Breckinridge, would conduct the count and certify the votes. Not only was Breckinridge a Southerner and slave owner, he had also been Lincoln’s closest competitor in the presidential race.

And the South did not like the outcome. For one thing, Lincoln’s election and the apprehension leading up to it inflicted a direct cost on the financial well-being of the South’s leading citizens, its planters. Cotton prices fell, as did the market value of slaves, and this in turn limited the planters’ ability to use them as security for mortgages and other investments. An “Extra No. 1” male who sold for $1,625 in Richmond over the preceding summer now sold for only $1,000, or 38.5 percent less. South Carolina reacted with particular fury. The day after the election, the state’s most senior federal officials resigned their posts, among them federal judge Andrew Gordon Magrath. “In the political history of the United States, an event has happened of ominous import to fifteen slaveholding States,” Magrath said upon resigning; he vowed that henceforth he would obey only the wishes of his own state. “So far as I am concerned,” he said, “the Temple of Justice, raised under the Constitution of the United States, is now closed.” Better that, he declared, than to have it “desecrated with sacrifices to tyranny.” Magrath’s act electrified the South.

To Lincoln all this rancor was a mystery. He could not fathom South Carolina’s reaction. An election had taken place; he had won; America’s greatest democratic tradition had been upheld. At no time had he threatened to abolish slavery or emancipate the millions of enslaved men and women who populated the plantations of the South. But fire-eaters and secessionist editors had portrayed him as seeking exactly that.

“What is it I could say which would quiet the alarm?” he wrote to a friend shortly before the election. “Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness, and cowardice, which perhaps should be avoided. Why do not uneasy men read what I have already said?”

But here Lincoln revealed his own myopia. What would soon become apparent was how little he understood the South, in particular the existential fear that its planter aristocracy harbored about his becoming president. This was especially the case in South Carolina, a state made desperate by an accumulation of forces both within and beyond its control.